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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24428713">Medical Education</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/quantumducky/pseuds/quantumducky'>quantumducky</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Becoming An Avatar (The Magnus Archives), Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, canonical character... undeath?, did yall know ao3 does not have an official tag for cadavers, had a breakdown. wrote this. bon appetit!, this is hard to tag for, warning for uh... descriptions of being a cadaver that is also conscious?</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 07:41:13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,025</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24428713</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/quantumducky/pseuds/quantumducky</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Before she was a corpse, she was a woman. She no longer remembers the specifics- name, age, family- but they haven’t mattered in years. She does, however, know that, when she was alive, she was very, very afraid of dying.</em>
</p><p>A speculation on the perspective of the eponymous cadaver in the episode "Dead Woman Walking."</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Banned Together Bingo 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Medical Education</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>i wrote this for me* but you get to read it too<br/> </p><p>*(to exorcise a deep-rooted dread from my soul)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Before she was a corpse, she was a woman. She no longer remembers the specifics- name, age, family- but they haven’t mattered in years. She does, however, know that, when she was alive, she was very, very afraid of dying.</p><p>It wasn’t the unpleasantness of it that bothered her- it would probably hurt, yes, but so did many other things. She didn’t fear the pain of her end nearly so much as what she knew would inevitably come after.</p><p>Nothing. No more pain, or feeling, or thought, or <em> her. </em> She understood pain and suffering. Her mind couldn’t properly wrap itself around the idea of simply not <em> being, </em> and that, above all, was what terrified her. The thought that someday, she would just be… gone. That, yes, the people she was close to would remember her, but in their own time, they would be gone as well. She hadn’t done anything unusually impressive. It wasn’t difficult to predict that, within a generation or two, it would be as if she had never existed in the first place.</p><p>That was why, when she knew her time was coming, she tried to ease her own dread whatever fraction she was able by donating her body for the use of medical students. Doctors, she reasoned, touched the lives of far more people than she ever could, and giving herself to the cause of their training meant all the people those students helped would be partially thanks to her. Preserved as a cadaver, she could live on after her death, at least for a while.</p><p>She might have made a different decision, had she known how <em> literal </em> that phrase would turn out to be.</p><p>She died in a hospital bed, surrounded by those about to grieve her. She regained consciousness on a metal table, hooked up to a machine pumping embalming chemicals through her veins. Her first instinct was to scream, but her mouth would not open and her lungs would not contract. In fact, she couldn’t move at all, not even the slightest twitch. It was then she understood that she had gotten her wish. Dead, but not gone.</p><p>It took her somewhat longer than that to comprehend the truth of what she had so naively wished upon herself. She lay wrapped in plastic on a cold metal shelf for days- weeks- months. Sleep was impossible in this frozen state. Her body was shriveled and bloodless, and though no other one of its systems had any function left in it, she still <em> felt </em> the cold and aching agony of that impossible existence, as if her nerve endings had come back to life purely to make sure she suffered for her failure to die properly. And still there was the certainty that even this would end, eventually, when some cosmic force decided she’d been left like this long enough. Even now, she couldn’t say that thought didn’t scare her.</p><p>And then there were the students.</p><p>She heard them long before they ever saw her. Taking out some other corpse to examine and cut apart, pretending like they weren’t creeped out at all. They were the ones she was here for, the ones her impact was supposed to live on through. She liked to listen to them talking when they were close enough, however juvenile their chatter sometimes was. Then, one day, something changed. She knew in a sudden flash that the day she was brought out and dissected would be the day her mind returned to whatever nothingness it had escaped the first time she died. From then on, she gradually began to hate them.</p><p>She heard the way they talked about the corpses they sliced into, how they tried to distance themselves from the bodies under their knives. Even their unease- it was disgust they always admitted to, <em> squeamishness. </em> Never the truth: that they feared the cadavers because they knew, somewhere deep down, the only difference between herself and them was an ultimately insignificant stretch of time. She hated the arrogance of them, acting as if the fact that they were alive meant anything. She hated the way they clearly thought the lives they intended to one day save mattered.</p><p>But their ignorance wasn’t their fault, was it? Not really. They were only students. It wasn’t their fault their teachers were unwilling to tell them the only truth of any real importance. And, after all, wasn’t helping them learn what she was here for?</p><p>And so she decided to tell them, to proselytize her gospel of the End. The moment she knew what she needed to do, it was as if she came alive all over again, free to move and breathe and speak. She wouldn’t be fooled- she knew better now. She was just as living as any of her students, which is to say: not at all, not in any truly meaningful way. Not any more than she ever had been or ever would be.</p><p>She doesn’t think of it as her purpose; that would be to claim she has any. She only thinks that it needs to be done, and she is the only one willing to do it. The students are tragically misinformed by their teachers, who insist to them that life has purpose and value- but she came here to help them, however misled she was herself at the time. It’s almost funny how little she knew, when she considered herself alive, what her true greater impact after death would be.</p><p>She’ll start with her students, and when they understand all she has to teach them, their new state of enlightenment will spread her lesson to everyone their influence touches. Through her example, everyone will come to see the truth of how little their lives mean, how little difference there is between what they call life and the death they so blithely avoid thinking of. She no longer has any illusion that fearing death or trying to avoid it does her any good, but she still can’t rest just yet. When she’s finally done sharing the knowledge of her body- that, she knows with a terrible, wonderful certainty, will be the day she ends.</p>
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